Global Religions, Beliefs, and Ideologies

Although religions, beliefs, and ideologies are often culturally specific, they also have been global, and increasingly so. Religious communities have spread throughout the globe and have created diasporic pockets of religious cultures, and religious ideas and ideologies—both secular and religious—have moved transnationally around the world. At the same time, transnational forms of religion and ideological belief systems have emerged that are associated with a new global civil society.

To study religious and other belief systems globally requires a stretch of imagination since it implies not only the study of ideas and communities in their global diasporas but also an understanding of how the world is viewed from multiple perspectives. On the one hand, the study of global religion is the study of religion in its global contexts, and it involves the study of religious diaspo-ras, the global spread of religious ideas, and the emerging spiritual and moral sensibilities of globalized, multicultural societies. But on the other hand, the global study of religion and other belief systems can affect all dimensions of religious and ideological studies—it involves taking a perceptual stance that is relevant to every aspect of the study of religion, whether the subject matter is local or far away, historical or contemporary, textual or social. The global perceptual stance is one that attempts to see all religious phenomena as part of a global drama, and to understand it through many eyes, from multiple frames of reference.

To borrow an idea from Jacques Lacan that has been reshaped by Charles Taylor, the “social imaginary” of our contemporary world—the sense of how individuals relate to the social whole—is increasingly a “global imaginary.” Thus, to study local religion is to study religion globally, whether it is a study of evangelical Christians responding angrily to a perception that the world has gone awry or a study of expatriate Muslims who feel alienated from the global ummah (community) of Islam. Scholars’ immediate analyses of what is going on in these situations may be only one part of the story. To understand them within a global imaginary, scholars need multiple lenses, and they need to challenge their own assumptions and their own language of investigation. One of the tasks of global studies is to see one's own contexts of intellectual discourse within a global frame, to understand, for instance, the secularity of post-Enlightenment modernity within a global context, to see it as a worldview that has been shaped by its spiritual and moral past—where the very categories of “secular” and “religion” are attempts to wrestle with religious ideas and authority—to discover how one's own views are perceived by people in other parts of the [Page 716]world, and in that sense to view all persons as players on a global stage.

For this reason, religious belief systems and secular ideologies can be said to provide similar roles. They both provide worldviews, frames of reference that are personal and moral but also social and organizational, and they both locate the individual within a larger framework of social and existential meaning.

Within the 20th century, the dominant ideologies on the global stage were secular. Nationalism appeared in many parts of the world with such a xenophobic fervor that the French social theorist, Alexis de Tocqueville, described it as a “strange religion” that was sweeping the globe. World War I and World War II were both fought—and won—in support of the idea of free and separate nationalisms in the face of old empires and new imperial constructs, such as “National Socialism”—the Nazism of Adolph Hitler. The latter was a form of another globalizing ideology, fascism, for which Italy's Benito Mussolini and Spain's Francisco Franco were also leading exponents. The latter half of the 20th century was a global contest between two great ideological constructs—the state socialism of communism and the democratic capitalism of the West. At the end of the 20th century and the rise of the 21st century, globalization took on the aura of ideology in some quarters, while in others aggressive new forms of religious political ideologies surfaced, some with global aspirations.

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